Challenge: Over $2million in lost revenue due to a cumbersome enrollment process
At Vanderbilt University, the Owen Graduate School of Management offers continuing education certificates for those students that want to develop a mastery of business skills in a certain area. Executive Education programs are popular and a good source of revenue for the University, but the use of an outdated, disjointed, manual CRM process and an awkward front-end interface meant a loss of potential revenue from interested participants – in fact, over $2million in lost revenue was tracked in 2017-2018 alone.
Solution: Streamlined CRM and Communication Processes using Salesforce EDA and Pardot
Vanderbilt University knew that enrollments in its Executive Education programs could be significantly increased if an optimized CRM system was put in place. Enter Salesforce.com.
With an automated communication flow, a seamless front and back-end customer experience and a single center for storing customer data, Salesforce solved all of the pain points of the manual process Vanderbilt had been using. Most importantly, the Salesforce platform included Higher Education Data Architecture (HEDA), a flexible and scalable data architecture Salesforce built specifically for universities. In addition, the platform offered Pardot, a leading marketing automation platform that enables universities to automatically engage prospective students by delivering relevant content to their email inbox to move them to the next stage of the registration process.
To accelerate implementation, Vanderbilt partnered with Invado Solutions. Invado Solutions takes a strategic approach to every project, looking at specific objectives and needs of its customers before diving into implementation.
In six short months, the Salesforce and Pardot architecture was built, including the EDA instances and forms that would be used to advance prospective students through enrollment and payment of the Certification Series.
Once implementation was complete, Invado Solutions outlined a nurture campaign to track participants as they contemplated signing up for a Certificate of Excellence or even just one program. If a participant signed up for one program, reminder emails were sent with more information to promote the benefits of the Certificate of Excellence series. Invado also integrated all lead generation activities into Salesforce so ROI could be tracked and lead generation campaigns could be optimized accordingly. In the first six weeks alone, Salesforce attributed to a 24% increase in prospect volume and a 14% increase in registrations for Executive Education programs.
Looking to quickly drive applications and admissions with Pardot and Salesforce? Email sales@invadosolutions.com for a consultation.
